About one year ago we said goodbye to our main office. Since then we have more or less thrived on a variety of working from home and using various shared office spaces. We continue to review how well this is working, and, like many businesses, we are learning and adapting as we go.
The quarterly gatherings are now an established thing in Infotex. Like many companies we used to have gatherings before, usually twice a year, but their purpose was different – they were a chance to get out of the office.
Now our gatherings are an important opportunity for the whole company to spend time together and use it to develop the business. Last week’s gathering was focussed on production. We wanted to bring together the opinions of everyone in the business, the people making and maintaining the websites and the people managing and delivering the services, and coordinate these into actionable ideas.
So we did for ourselves what we have done with our clients so many times over the years, and held a workshop. Our workshop leader on this occasion was Kris Parker, who true to form, made the session all the more engaging with some thoughtful preparation, to get everyone’s minds into problem solving mode. Code named “Project Dylan”, Kris broke down the workshop into two halves – brainstorming and shortlisting ideas.
The “interval” was nicely defined by an evening visit to our good friends at Fishers Gin, who kindly hosted us in their distillery, which is a stunning state-of-the-art facility located on the Aldeburgh beachfront. I have no doubt that the output of our workshop was enhanced by this inspirational interval.
We are lucky to be part of the CSF Group of businesses, which is based alongside Martley Hall Stud. Here we have fantastic modern office facilities, and layers of business support. We were allowed to take over the Equestrian Arena cafe, which proved to be a brilliant workspace with everything we needed, plus some beautiful thoroughbred horses to inspire us.
All in all, this latest gathering has been once again unique. We all learned something new, spent valuable time together, and gave serious decisions to development of our production systems in our constantly evolving operating environment.
